Crashed
by Mystic25
Summary: It took a second car crash for Stefan to remember. Stefan/Damon centric. Set after 5x04. T for imagery, violence, and language.
1. Chapter 1

"Crashed"

Mystic25

Summary: It took a second car crash for Stefan to remember. Stefan/Damon centric. T for imagery, violence, and language.

A/N: I wrote this after 5x04, and with the constant airing of new episodes, it will be AU now, but I'm a fanfic author, I do AU like it's my _job._

A/N #2: This does contain Delena, but minor, because the focus lies somewhere else.

**xxxxxXxxxx**

"_Then I crashed into you, and I went up in flames._

_Could've been the death of me; but then you breathed your breath in me."_

~Daugthry "Crashed."

**xxxxXxxxx**

The world blurred by at a dizzying pace, bleeding like an oil painting across a canvas, turning colors into a solitary darkness.

Stefan had the windows rolled down of the car he had stolen, a Dodge Charger, nowhere near the power and speed of the car the Damon had taken earlier in the week, but it did its job. He had compelled the kid pumping gas to give him the keys, and had even managed to restrain from leaving him headless in a puddle of his own arterial blood before he gunned the engine and sped away.

He had swiped a handful of blood bags from the basement freezer, and so far he'd gone through three of them, discarding them on the passenger side floor of the far like candy wrappers. The vampire hunger in his stomach was quenched for now, but hardly sated. He only had memories that spanned weeks, but one of the strongest was the taste of blood from the waitress in that tavern, and that kid from the bond fire. It was almost – euphoric to drink their blood, it gave him a sense of _power._

He reached into the cooler he placed the blood bags in and picked up a full one, plump with blood like rising bread dough. He bit through the shaft of the bag where it would be spiked with an IV with his fangs (an odd feeling, he bit through his own tongue at least five times before he got the hang of it.). He swallowed the viscous liquid, trying to ignore the gnawing pit in his stomach for something stronger.

He had nearly killed two people back in that town of Mystic Falls, and maybe it was a part of his old 'sad loner self' coming through, or a part of a newly formed conscious half buried under the thick veneer of retrograde amnesia – but the act of taking human life for his own sustenance didn't sit well with him regardless of either circumstance.

It was almost three in the morning and the roads were deserted except for one lone semi-truck that had barreled down him a while back ago with its halogen headlights before trying to pass him, and had nearly been run off the road as Stefan shifted the car into high gear and spun fast in a move worthy of the Indy 500. He had turned in the wrong direction down the two lane highway jutting into the other lane seconds before an impact. The truck's blaring horn had shaken the windows of the Charger like an earthquake.

Stefan had been driving for over 9 hours, passing sleepy towns and highly reflective truck stops. And he had since discovered that his dead vampire body _craved _adrenaline. The people he had managed to attack back in Mystic Falls all radiated the scent of _fear_, even the girl he compelled. The adrenaline coursing through their blood stream, he could _taste_ it. He had no memories of his past so he couldn't accurately say that he had never been high before, but he could easily imagine that tasting fresh human blood from the people's pumping jugular's had the same kind of feeling. The feeling that all your senses are so super heightened that you can count each individual heartbeat in a crowd of people down to the exact second; the place where light sings and colors have a smell.

Stefan felt that with each person he drank from, as well as the hunger that Damon had insisted turned him into the _Ripper of Monterey. _ From the way Damon described it and what Stefan read in the journals before he burned them down to ash, he had been a serial killer for over 30 years.

The strangeness of his long immortal life was what had shocked him the most. He didn't look a day over 18, and yet he had a brother who recalled with startling accuracy things that happened during 1800's Civil War period Virginia; over 165 years ago. Damon even had old Daguerreotypes depicting both of them looking just the same as they did now, only with Stefan wearing a cravat and tails and Damon in a Confederate war uniform. The writing on the back of the thick yellowed paper read: _February 1865, Salvatore Plantation, Virginia._

They both had their arms around each other and actually looked _happy_. Damon had told them all he could about their old life, how they were raised as the only two sons to a wealthy plantation owner. How their mother had been a Virginia socialite, who had caught the eye of their father Giuseppe, and like she was a sack of corn, a deal was struck with her father to marry her off to him, and Stefan and Damon were a result of that union. Damon told him how their mother died of consumption when he was 8 and Stefan was 4, he talked how he left to fight in the Civil War at 22. He even talked about how Katherine Pierce had seduced them both and turned them into Vampires in the same night.

But Damon never commented on pictures like that one he showed Stefan tucked in some dusty first addition volume of The Leather Stocking Tales , or mentioned the relationship they had growing up, or even after they turned. It was like how he hadn't mentioned Elena to Stefan, or talked about how they had dated for several years, before she had chosen Damon over him. Since he had woken up, Stefan had only known his brother for three weeks, but having no past memory of Damon allowed him an outsider's perspective on him – Damon lied. He avoided the truth at all costs for self-preservation. He didn't want Stefan to know that he had once dated, been in _love_ with Elena Gilbert, because doing so might dredge up past feeling she had for him and slash through their relationship like a serrated knife through a sheet of canvas. Damon didn't talk about their own relationship outside of naming dates, and factual tidbits, like it was a Venn Diagram of Stefan's life, not the life history of two people who had been brothers for almost two centuries.

The life that the old (_very old_) Stefan Salvatore had was self-detrimental. Stefan didn't know if his old self used to believe in Karma, but after spending weeks viewing his past life as an observer, losing his memory might have been part of the cosmic alignment of his fate.

He took another long pull from the blood bag like it was a soda in a paper cup. A large green sign just past mile marker 76 proclaimed Stefan to now be in West Virginia. The landscape did little to change with this news, the gas stations and the stretches of empty highway remained the same. At least until he reached the boundaries of the Appalachian mountains and the flatness gave way to huge brown elevation dotted with a few lights of those who had either just woken up or not gone to sleep. Trucks began again to emerge on the highway that crept up into the mountains like a snake.

They were semis like the one he had cut off 8 hours and one state back ago, and huge tankers hauling gasoline and crude oil. The grade up the mountain began to grow steep, almost an 80 degree angle and the car Stefan had stolen began to groan and creak. The engine was a supped up V6, (Stefan had no idea how he managed to know modern things such as that, and couldn't remember being alive for 165 years prior). But a Dodge Charger was not an off road vehicle. It didn't have the torque to handle the route that Stefan realized halfway up was reserved for a trucking route into the mountains.

Not that he was about to let anything as trivial as that stop him.

He floored the accelerator, taking the car way past 150 miles, the air blew by him like a cyclone, trees almost seeming to fly at his speed. Honking horns blared at him as he zigzagged in and out of the lumbering vehicles, zipping past a guard rail gone black and rust filled with neglect. He was pretty far up now, most likely over 1,000 feet. From this high up the full moon was visible like a giant lamp in the sky sprinkled with a freckling of starts.

It was actually a picturesque sight to see, even for an amnesiac 165-year-old vampire trying to escape a past that he couldn't even remember.

The cup holder flashed brightly as the smart phone he had thrown there the moment he'd stolen the car rang.

Stefan glanced down and read the caller ID, the screen flashing a bright, single name:

'_Damon.'_

Stefan sighed in irritation half gone to just being pissed as hell, tempted at first to let the damn thing ring. Or better yet, to hurl it out the window at a terminal velocity that would reduce it to powder by the time it reached the bottom of the mountainside.

But on the third annoyed vibrated buzz he threw the blood bag down on the empty passenger seat and snatched the phone up.

"What do you want?"

"_Now that's not a nice way to greet your older brother after you ran away from home without leaving a forwarding address."_

"If you called to try and convince me to come back, you might as well throw your phone onto the fire with my journals Damon because I'm not coming back."

"_Ouch, Stef, that almost hurt my feelings."_ Damon voice chirped in his ear in such a sarcastic timbre that Stefan wondered how the hell his old self managed to put up with him for over 16 decades.

"Tell me something-" Stefan questioned into the phone "Did this cynical personality of yours get anywhere with me when I had my memories?"

"_No, but you were always a fount of brooding and self-righteousness, Stefan. The only thing that got to you was manually ripping that stick out of your ass."_

"I'm going to ask you one more time before I turn this phone into confetti," Stefan growled, leaning one elbow against the driver's side door as he wound the car a particularly curved portion of the mountain side. "What is it you want? You already apparently made my life a living hell for 160 years, and stole my girlfriend, _twice_. Don't you think that's enough damage for a century?"

"_What I want is for you to turn around from whatever little _field trip_ of self-loathing you've driven yourself too-"_

Stefan managed a laugh, it was dry sounding, like he wasn't used to doing it. "And why is that?"

"_Don't _question_,"_ Damon's voice was curt and biting. "_Just drive-"_

Stefan currently didn't know his own brother from a hole in the ground, but he sounded pissed. It was actually kind of amusing. "If you can name me _one_ good reason why I should listen to you, then I'll turn the car around."

"_I can think of a _million _good reasons why you should listen to me! One of my top ones is about the amnesiac vampire who doesn't remember shit about the rules and is going to get the rest of us exposed!_"

"If that's your best version of a motivational speech buddy, then I recommend you stick with your night job_," _Stefan drove past an elevation marker saying that he had reached over 1,500 feet. One of the perks of being a Vampire, Stefan had discovered, was that he had night vision, _true_ night vision, like predatory cats in Africa. So he was able to see the landscape at the base of the mountain bumpy with the scraggly trees he had driven past hours ago. The road ahead of him continued to curve and Stefan accelerated as he followed it.

"_Don't do the whole sarcastic comment thing Stefan, you're innately _bad _at it."_

"You know, the whole bonding thing might actually be touching if I had _any_ memories of you whatsoever, and hadn't found out you were such a _dick-_"

"_Harsh Brother," _Damon retaliated snappishly.

"What'd you expect?" Stefan returned. "Your most recent actions towards me were repeatedly breaking my neck so you and Silas could continue with your diabolical plans."

"_It wasn't _diabolical _Stefan!"_ Damon's insisted, his voice going up in a pitch that Stefan had heard enough to know that Damon was about to explain away something. "_I needed Silas at full mind reading power, if you were still alive _that _couldn't happen. I merely provided temporary rectification for the problem; it's not like I was going to keep you dead."_

"If that's the kind of thing that passed as brotherly bonding between us then I wonder how we even lasted this long."

"_Blame it on the alcohol Brother."_

Stefan laughed again, that dry sound that he still wasn't used to. He wondered when was the last time his former self every _truly_ laughed. "We're done here, _brother-"_ The bulkiness of his daylight ring tapped against the phone. "Whatever kind of relationship we had, Damon, it was obviously a very detrimental one because you've yet to prove that it wasn't." Stefan shifted the phone to his other ear. "So here's what's going to happen. I'm going to hang up this phone, and follow this road until it runs out, then I'm going to follow another road until _it_ runs out, and another, and another until I've put enough distance between me and you as possible."

Damon left no moment for pause. _"Bad idea Stef-"_

But Stefan did. "Goodbye Damon." He ended the call and threw the phone out the window, and with his enhanced senses he heard the exact moment the phone broke apart on the road 1,600 feet below.

Stefan had driven with the radio off for the better part of three hours, choosing instead to listen to the wind blow up his ears the faster he pushed the car. But listening to the funneling wind was starting to become annoying. He reached over and pressed the dial for the satellite radio. An electric guitar's heavy riff filled the interior. It wasn't a bad beat and not having any memory of what his taste in music had been like previously kept him from switching the station. He reached for the blood bag he discarded and took a long, guzzling sip like it was whiskey.

The back end of a tanker truck pulled into view; dropping his speed down to a veritable crawl. A sign on the back of the tank proclaimed the contents the truck hauled to be '_flammable' _The truck was barely doing 35 miles an hour, and Stefan's irritation with it didn't take long to creep on. He placed the car in four gear and accelerated.

The Charger was clear up to the front wheels of the truck's cab, when the truck's very front wheel blew. The truck spun on its hub cap, the cabin and trailer lurching in a 45 degree jack knife. Stefan flattened the gas, but the back of the Charger smacked into the truck's remaining right inflated wheel. This action torqued the car backwards, and into the trailer.

The impact broke through the aluminum tank and the contents of the tanker erupted into a massive fireball that lit up the night like the sun.

Stefan was flung out of the car, landing on the road, beside the truck's cab which had busted through the guardrail and hung halfway out over a thousand feet in the open air.

The back of the tanker was a wall of fire, and the line of gas down the road from the Charger's broken gas tank quickly ignited in a trail that zigzagged its way up the road up both Stefan's pant legs.

The pain was instantaneous. It hurt more that Stefan believed that being lit on fire was supposed to feel like, it was like something was _melting_ him from the inside out. He screamed horrendously into the ball of fire that blocked out the star filled night, back arching up off the ground in sheer agony, as the flames crept further up his body.

A wall of clouded ice cold vapor shot at him like fast moving fog, ramping up the burning feeling to a blinding coldness that shock waved through his system.

His eyes felt melted together, even when he managed to open them, they were horribly wrong. Vision half blurred, and red around the edges. Something black moved around him, a face gone half blurry like raindrops against the window stared at him, cursing louder.


	2. Chapter 2

**xxxxXxxx**

"_Humpty Dumpty sat on a Wall,_

_Humpty Dumpty had a Great Fall,_

_All the Kings Horses' and All the Kings Men_

_Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again."_

~Lewis Carol Through the Looking Glass

**xxxxxxXxxxx**

"_Stefan?"_

_Stefan found himself in a dark blue silk suit with tails and red cravat. _

_His vision was clear, he was standing at a large hanging oval mirror framed in bronze, staring at his_ _reflection. His hair was floppier, done in a style he imagined went with the times his clothing belonged in._

_He felt a brief creeping pain on his legs, like they were still on fire. But when he glanced down, he found them undamaged, in perfectly creased pants._

_A man stood behind him, the image he had seen in the Daguerreotype come to life; his father. He was standing in the doorway in the same style of suit, only a darker shade of blue, a gold plated pocket watch dangling on a chain above a breast pocket. _

"_Everyone is waiting downstairs," His father's voice was stern, but not overly harsh. There was a bit of fondness in it as he stared at Stefan. _

"_I'm," Stefan was at a bit of a loss for words. He did not remember this moment, or this _time period_ for that matter; he wasn't sure how he was supposed to behave. "I'm sorry, Father," Stefan stepped away from the mirror, heavy black walking shoes clinking on hardwood rosewood floors. "I was just-"_

_His father, Giuseppe, he remembered reading the name in the journal he burned, shrugged into a smile. "I _suppose _you're allowed a moment of adleheadedness," Giuseppe stepped more into the room. He wore the same type of shoes as Stefan, but they resonated with more of a heavier sound when he walked, like he was used to commanding a room. "After all, it's not every day a boy turns 17."_

_Stefan gave a slight cock of his head at the information. He remembered reading in his journals that he was born on November third. The room he stood in was warm because of the fire, and his clothes kept him insulated enough to not notice any coolness in the air. But he supposed that the mere _presence _of a fire in the fireplace suggested that it was nearing winter in this time period. _

_Giuseppe stepped closer to him and set a hand on his shoulder. "You are a man today, Stefan. Nothing makes me prouder than to bear witness to it."_

_Stefan glanced over at the hand on his shoulder, it felt solid enough, even though he was pretty damn sure that that he was dreaming, since he had just been flung out all over an abandoned road._

_But at least he wasn't on fire and in blinding pain in this dream, so he decided to let things play out. "Thank you Father."_

_A knock on the opened door made them both look up to it._

"_Damon," Giuseppe stared at Damon in the doorway in a dark black suit. His hair was longer like Stefan's and had a bit of curl to it. "What is it?"_

_Damon had his hands behind his back, so poised and proper. Stefan wanted for a moment to laugh at him, like a _long_ moment at the sight of Damon looking so _docile. _ But the moment passed and never happened and Damon stepped lightly into the room like he was used to doing so._

"_I came to wish my brother a happy birthday Father," Damon said. "Before all the festivities got underway and I am drowned out by the general populous of his admirers." There was a look of pride on Damon's face that Stefan had never seen before, he looked like he wanted to wink at Stefan like what he said was a secret joke they shared. It lasted for a minute, this look, before one of propriety settled across his face. Damon stepped into the room, hands still behind his back. "That is if I am allowed to do so."_

_Giuseppe eyed Damon with a bit of something that bordered on annoyance. "You try my patience with your sarcasm Damon. One would think that you would put better use to your verbal _talents_ in talking with your commanding officer to rejoin the troops marching on Atlanta."_

_A look passed between Damon and their father; Stefan remembered reading in one of the very first journal he had ever written about how Damon had joined the Confederate Army, but had abandoned the battlefield after two months of fighting. He never told Stefan as to _why _this was, making some off handed comment about wanting to be around tight corseted women versus sweating, rancid smelling soldiers caked in mud._

_Reading about such a thing, and actually witnessing it (though he wasn't sure of the _actually _part, since he was more than sure he was knocked out or _dead_ on some part of the road) weren't exactly the same thing._

_Damon did not say anything to retaliate from his father's outburst, just remained standing there like it was a feat he was used to undertaking._

_Giuseppe sighed at his oldest son like he'd just been bested in a staring contest. "I expect both of you downstairs in _10 minutes," _Giuseppe pulled his pocket watch out and studied the time. _

"_Of course Father," Damon returned, finally with enough of an undercoating of sarcasm that Stefan recognized from the version of Damon that he had known for almost a month. _

"_I mean what I say Damon," Giuseppe returned. "_Everyone _is downstairs waiting," Giuseppe said 'everyone' with just enough inflection that Stefan got that there were more than likely important people from their town waiting on them._

"_He says we'll be there," Stefan returned._

_Both Damon and Giuseppe turned to look at him like he just said something indecent. Apparently, he'd never talked like this before._

_Giuseppe stared at both his sons, but retreated down the stairs without another retort. Stefan and Damon tracked his movements down the spiral staircase until his figure disappeared from their view entirely._

_Once he was gone Damon turned back to Stefan. "You actually said something that went against Father's favor Stefan," Damon eyed him like he was headless, but he had just recently discovered that he _liked _headless things. "You are truly embracing your manhood."_

"_Someone had too," Stefan said back. "He was being a little too self-righteous."_

_Damon actually laughed, a _real _laugh, setting hands on both of Stefan's shoulders. "Your brazenness for the day is commendable," He slapped Stefan affectionately on the back and embraced him. "Happy Birthday brother."_

_Stefan curled his hands for a moment, not sure what the hell just happened; because Damon was actually _hugging _him. The Damon that his mind knew broke necks, and manipulated people to his own ends, he didn't hug._

"_Thanks," Stefan patted Damon twice on the back, hoping that he would be released soon because this was seriously staring to weird him out. _

_Damon pulled away, a genuine smile on his face. "You being a man is a bit of a feat brother, since you still have those scars on your knees when you tried to jump off the barn because you believed you could fly. It's going to take some getting used to."_

"_You and me both Damon," Stefan returned. He had no idea if this was how he talked in 1864; but he had no idea about pretty much everything, so he just went with it._

_Damon slapped the side of his face affectionately. "You've kept your guests waiting long enough Mr. Salvatore." Damon did a grand kind of flourished wave with his hand towards the opened door. "Shall we?"_

_Stefan stepped through the doorway with Damon and found himself at the landing at the top of a winding white staircase. Two curved sets of stairs below was a gathering of at least 40 people- Men in long suits and cravats, and gloves; and women in dresses with hems that touched the floor and necklines that touched their breasts. _

_Stefan descended the steps, looking at the women in their silk dresses and the men in their dark suits. "Where's Katherine?"_

"_She is in town attending to business," Damon said this like it was something Stefan should have known. "She promises she'll return later on, after the crowds have dispersed."_

"_Of course she will," Stefan had never actually _met _Katherine Pierce, (at least that he could remember) But from all he read about her, he knew that she was a back stabbing, manipulative bitch. "Attending to business" for her probably included ripping out the throats of a few locals._

_Stefan and Damon finally reached the bottom level of the house. A man with pecan skin complexion in a butler's uniform held out a tray of champagne flutes filled to the brim with the bubbled spirits. "Master Damon," The man smiled as Damon took one of the flutes with a 'thank you'. He turned his smile to Stefan despite the fact both he _and _Stefan knew him to be a slave. Stefan had done some crazy shit in the little time he remembered as his, but the idea that their family _owned _people way back when was very disturbing. _

"_Master Stefan." The man held out the flute to Stefan, careful not to let his fingers stray from the cloth napkin he was using to grasp the long stem of the glass. _"_Congratulations on the day Sir."_

_Stefan took the Champaign "Thank you," he trailed off when he realized he didn't know the man's name, and sipped from the glass to try and cover._

_The man nodded and disappeared with the tray like he was merely a part of the background._

"_Stefan!" A woman in a pink dress as bright as a piece of bubble gum and more lace then a pair of Chantilly curtains paraded up to him. She wore a giant feather in her hair the same bright vivid pink as her dress, and half of the feather went up Stefan's nose as she grasped the back of his neck and kissed the side of his face._

"_Happy birthday!" She pulled away smelling heavily of lemons and lye soap, a wooden fan hung by a silk cord around a buttoned gloved wrist. _

"_Thanks- Thank you," Stefan corrected, trying to base his decorum on old black and white movies about the South during the war. This was something that also confused him; he remembered things like Clark Gable's adaptation of "Gone with the Wind" and the transmission displacement of cars and motorcycles, but he couldn't remember his own birthday._

_The woman before him smiled, half doe full, but more seductive. She looked to be about only a few years older than him, piles of dark brown ringlets and her feather bouncing in her excitement. "Oh come now Mr. Salvatore, surely you can do better than that?" her fan came open with a 'snap' and she stared at him over it like it was a seduction ritual. She looked over at Damon like they shared a secret about Stefan's behalf. "Has Ms. Pierce captivated you so much that you would forget your childhood friends?" Her eyes turned somewhat accusatory at Stefan, but she hid it behind batting eyelashes._

"_Forgive me," Stefan glanced to Damon, to see if he would help him out by mentioning her name to him since he was drawing a total blank; but Damon said nothing. _

_Stefan took the woman's gloved hand. "Guess in all the excitement I neglected even, old friends-" He kissed her hand, and this made her preen like a bird in mating season. Stefan had no idea what their relationship was, but it was obvious that she liked him._

_The crowd of people were thick with swishing skirts and champagne being drunk in overly large quantities, all the socialites of Mystic Falls coming out to celebrate one of their own. Stefan knew their family was wealthy, but he and Damon (as far as he knew at least) didn't have black triple platinum cards or anything to mark their wealth. The marble fire place, the servants, the crystals, it all slapped him in the face screaming: _old money.

"_You are forgiven _this _time Stefan, But don't let it happen again." She laughed as she took a Champaign glass and the tinkling of the crystal drowned out the end of her laughter._

"_Trust me Ms. Forbes," Damon spoke up beside Stefan, finally. "My brother is well versed on not getting on your bad side-"_

_The name 'Forbes' turned Stefan's back down to the woman. She was brunette, and shorter, but the resemblance in her facial features of her to her great, great, whatever descendant she was, was very distinct now that he knew what he was looking for. _

"_Ms. _Forbes?"

_Alexandra Forbes rolled up her fan and tapped Stefan with it like it would pass for a lethal blow. "Enough with all the formality _Stefan! _We are school companions. I knew you when you were in short breeches after all, you don't need to stand on ceremony like a Knight of Camelot." Alexandra said this the way only childhood friends could. Too bad Stefan couldn't remember her._

"_That type of speech is useless on him," Damon set both hands on Stefan's shoulders, but it was totally affectionate. "You would sooner have luck trying to get a Giraffe to wander out of Africa and pull your Landau." _

_Both Damon and Alexandra Forbes shared a bit of a laugh, Stefan remained silent, trying to process a world where Damon tended to laugh, _freely_, without sarcasm. _

_Damon released one of Stefan's shoulders amidst Alexandra Forbes returning light laughter and snagged another champagne glass and a discarded silver cocktail fork from a servant in gray, who gave a small curtsey but left without a word._

"_Ladies and Gentleman," Damon banged the fork against the glass and it clanged like a bell. Heads turned to him. "Join me in a toast will you? To honor my brother on his birthday." Damon raised his glass, and the decorated party guests picked up his gesture. "To Stefan."_

_The guests repeated his words and sipped from their glasses, some of the women clapped before doing so._

_Stefan raised the glass to his lips, feeling a weird pull to do so. It wasn't like he was remembering anything about the event his mind chose to re live, it was more like going into an auto pilot mode, like a weird kind of decorum puppet string from his past that was being pulled._

_At least the champagne was good, strong almost like turpentine; apparently sobriety in Mystic Falls was almost nonexistent in the 1800's. _

_Through the crowd, past a over middle aged woman with a snowy white chest showing through too much décolletage, a figure in a red hooded cape moved through the crowd as brightly as a cardinal through the snow. The dress she wore was the same color as the hood, and daring. The fabric scooped down low cut over ample breasts, and unlike the dowress next to her, not above being examined. But Stefan was looking at that._

_He was looking at her face, dark almond shaped eyes, and a stare older than anyone else in the room._

_Quitseyah, the woman Damon had told him was the witch who had erased his memory, observed him over a half empty champagne glass._

_The sight of her was enough of a shock that Stefan found himself going through a human response and choking on the sip of alcohol he was just about to swallow._

_Alexandra Fell turned at the sound, "Stefan?" her eyes went wide, and a gloved hand rested on his wrist. "What is it? Are you alright?"_

"_Stefan?" Beside him Damon brought up the same question in his name, a hand on his back. "What?" Damon obviously saw him staring at something because he darted his eyes over to where Stefan was looking. "What's going on?" _

_The red dress moved through the crowd like Little Red Riding Hood through the forest, she opened the right side of a double door in the back of the room and vanished._

"_Nothing," Stefan said._

"_You look like you've seen a ghost," Alexandra's hand was still on his wrist, Damon's still on his back._

"_I'm fine," Stefan returned to both of them. '"It's just," he glanced first at Alexandra, then at Damon. "I just need some air. Excuse me." He pushed past Alexandra and through the crowd of people, hearing the calls of a few well wished 'happy birthdays' trailing after him and dying out as he opened the door and shut it behind him._

_The room he entered was small, at least compared to the one he just left. It looked like a study with a large desk of dark mahogany and a grandfather clock of the same wood, pendulum set in motion. A massive set of built in book shelves stood behind the clock filled with leather bound books in various colors. _

_A set of white curtains stood partway open at a long window, revealing a moon light garden of topiaries and marble statues. _

_The desk held three leather bound journals, and the woman in red, Qetsiyah, stood at one corner of it, flipping through one of the book's pages._

_Stefan approached Qetsiyah, his shoes clicking on the floor boards. "Why are you here?"_

"_I'm not," Qetsiyah flipped through one more page of the journal before setting it back down on the desk. _

_She lowered the hood of her cape, thick hair a brown only a shade darker than black spilled out freely onto her shoulders. "And neither are you," she turned to him with her dark eyes. "None of this is real Stefan; this is all just playing itself in your head."_

"_Look I may have _no memory_ of who I am," Stefan crossed his arms over his chest, "But I'm pretty certain that I don't like 2,000 year old vindictive witches screwing with my mind."_

"_I didn't create this world," Quetsiyah retaliated. "This is all you, or rather _part _of you." She picked up a black and white daguerreotype in an oval frame from the desk, of a woman in a lace dress and dark hair with eyes that looked like his._

"_Enough with the games," Stefan cut her off mid rant as she fingered the image of the mother he couldn't remember. "Tell me what you're talking about-" Stefan wished he could add 'or I'll kill you' after this remark, but he assumed that he would have as much luck with that feat in here as he would in the present time._

"_Out there, in the actual world, you were run off the road and lit on fire, - you're _dying_, Stefan." Qetsiyah put down the photograph, and stepped around the desk to Stefan, the hem of her cape brushing the floor. _

_Stefan knew she wasn't lying, being lit on fire wasn't exactly something even an amnesiac would forget about anytime soon. But being here was almost like an opiate, dulling him to the recall of it all. He glanced around the room, to the desk, the windows, that all seemed sturdy enough to be real. "So what is this place then?"_

"_A shared memory between you and another – Damon." She said it like was a grand stage theatric line. "All of this is a manifestation of the connection you have with your brother. I gotta say, I have been inside the heads of _centuries'_ worth of different shadows of Silas; and the love for Amara is always the strongest pull. But you have been stripped of _everything_, both mentally physically, and _this _is what your dying brain comes up with." She studied him like he was a very rare Phoenix crawled out of hiding for the first time in over a hundred years. Qetsiyah let her remark sit like a heavy ceramic vase filled with wine in front of Stefan. "Your relationship with your brother, it's _intriguing_ to say the least."_

_Stefan stared back at the witch, his dark eyes upon her dark eyes. "So how is it that you're here? I may not remember this place, but Damon does, and he never mentioned seeing you before."_

"_Because it was not him that I wished to see," Qetsiyah plucked a pinned bloom of magnolia petals from her hair, breaking apart the fragrant white petals in her fingers. "I was never _actually _here Stefan," the petals dropped one at a time from her fingers like discarded snowflakes onto the desk's surface. "When you allowed me to link your mind with Silas' it created a back door; I can access this portal whenever I want, but it is strongest when my subject is as near death as you are."_

"_You keep talking about how I'm two seconds away from not needing a bell over my own grave," Stefan insisted. "So then why are you stopping it? Why not just let me go?"_

"_I linked you to Silas', as long as you are alive, he cannot use his mind control powers." A shallow silver bowl had suddenly materialized underneath Qetsiyah's hands, the flower petals now resting inside it. She swirled them around like she was mixing a Cosmopolitan. _

_A realization suddenly dawned on Stefan, even though Damon had yelled it at him earlier. "So Damon snapping my neck back there?"_

"_A tactic," Qetsiyah raised her hand and a few of the petals floated above the rim of the bowl. "He was working with Silas in order to find the location of my anchor, he needed to keep you down long enough for Silas to discover where it was hidden. He would not have let you stay dead."_

"_Wow," Stefan retorted, half wondering how come no one at his own birthday party had come to check up on him after he basically abandoned them all, and half trying to keep up with the fast pace of the witch. He stepped closer to her, and noticed for the first time, that there were other things inside the bowl besides flowers, a small finger bone, and something coarse and black that resembled whole peppercorns. "You know, for someone who claims she's never been in my past, you seem to know a lot about Damon."_

"_They're _your _memories Stefan, not mine," Qetsiyah said this with a snarky kind of laugh. "I've only been inside your brain for the last few hours and I can _feel_ them hum of everything between you and Damon trying to break its way free. It's why I'm here," A glass pestle appeared in her hand in the same unknown way as the bowl appeared on the desk. She ground the flower petals into the bowl, the bone cracked and broke into jagged particles. "I need you alive, but if you regain your memories of your brother then you regain _everything," _She set the pestle down with a clunk, and began to stir the contents of the bowl with her fingertips again. She did this for a full two minutes before she picked up the bowl in both hands and held it out to him like she was offering him a serving of soup. _"_Remembering 155 years of the kind of horrendous atrocities you have done-" Her eyes flashed to him, and for one split second, they turned molten, like melted copper coins. "It will shatter your mind so completely that you will be no better off alive then you are dead. It would be like offering Silas his mind control back on a platter, and I cannot allow that!" _

_She began to swirl her hand around the bowl like she was fanning a flame, chanting in a dead kind of language that sounded like a mixture between Latin and Greek; eyes closed as if in reverent prayer. Her chanting was cut off like a car veering off a roadside when Stefan yanked her hard by her wrist. _

"_For the last three weeks I have listened to everyone explain to me about my own life. Elena, Damon, Caroline, and now you – trying to make me who I was before, trying _not_ to make me who I was before. But here's the thing, no one gets to decide what I get to do with my own life, but _me," _Stefan released Qetsiyah's arm, and she grunted in indignation, staring him down like her vision could melt him down where he stood, but then her scowl became a shock when she felt Stefan grab her, the tip of a white bladed letter opener pressed to her neck._

"_My brother is a self-serving, sanctimonious psychopathic asshole, but he did tell me a fascinating little tidbit about witches, even ones as old as you;" Stefan pressed the dulled blade of the letter deeper into her neck, perhaps enjoying it a little too much. "You can be repelled from any vision that you didn't personally create, so I suggest that's what you start doing before I find a way to shatter your mind so completely you're going to wish you were dead."_

_Qetsiyah grunted like an angry bull, she twisted her hand like she was working a rusted doorknob open. _

_Stefan's hold on her loosened as a stabbing pain shot through his head, dropping him to the floor. It felt like something was clawing through his skull, trying to break free._

"_It's true," Quetsiyah stepped over to Stefan writhing on the ground. "I have to leave if you order me out of something I didn't make with my own two hands. But that doesn't mean I can't make you suffer before I go." She squeezed her hand tighter and Stefan dropped lower, like something had lit his heart on fire and was now trying to pull the flaming thing out of his ribcage. _

"_Do you want to know the twisted part?" Quetsiyah knelt down, the fabric of her full skirt flouncing our around her like a deflating balloon. "All of this pain you're experiencing isn't from my magic, it's your body buckling under the weight of a centuries worth of _pain, _it's you waking up to the realization that you're about to _die. _All of that sanctimoniousness you were talking about? It runs in the family. I already did a locator spell Stefan, I know where you are, I_ will _find you and I will set things back on their rightful track."_

_Stefan could hear Qetsiyah's angry tone, feel her breath that felt as hot as fire, but the pain ripping through him was brutal. _

_Her hand stroked his cheek like a lover. "I'll see you soon Stefan."_

_The door to the study finally burst open._

"_Stefan?" Alexandra Forbes's voice was high and shrill, and shocked. _

_Stefan's lungs felt like they were locked in a vice, he jerked forward in convulsions and vomited large amounts of rancid smelling water._

"_Stefan?" Alexandra's voice became a scream. "Mr. Salvatore, Damon! Somebody please help!"_

_The floor began to fill up with water, the walls shrank down and became dark black and murky. Stefan struggled for air, gasping, choking, lungs screaming to breathe with each painful inhalation of water._

_A parade of images began blowing through his mind. He was a small child running barefoot through their gardens with Damon, while his mother sat in the shade of the porch, parasol covering her face, sickly, but smiling. Damon leaving for the war, deserting, Katherine being taken to the church, Damon wanting to die on the shores of the lake, Stefan bringing him the girl, transforming his brother into a vampire, the hate, the anger, the blood flow he induced in the 1920's. Seeing his brother in New Orleans._

_The images began to blur faster, faster, all becoming a central focus. Damon returning to Mystic Falls, staking but failing repeatedly to kill him over and over again, being strung up by a hostile group of vampires and saved by Elena and his brother, a werewolf bite, going for a cure to save him, flipping his switch off, flipping it back on, losing Elena to Damon after _years_, but unable to leave, wishing Damon luck with his new predicament, being stabbed and dropped into the quarry by Silas, the agony of drowning and dying over and over again, for _months.

_Lying on the banks of the quarry with Elena in a delusion, but having conversation after conversation with Damon in a repeated loop._

"_Just turn it off. Turn it off." Damon's arms on his shoulders, pleading with him to flip his switch, to free himself from his watery hell. His name repeated over and over again by the same voice, and it wasn't Elena's._

"_Stefan,"_

"STEFAN"

"Stefan."

"_**Stefan!**__"_

Stefan's eyes snapped open into a blur of climbing shadows, a man hovering over him, a sharp implement in his hand.

Stefan shot out of the air, half mad with adrenaline, attacking the man's neck, hearing him scream.

A buzzing burn coursed his way through his mind, dropping him with a choke to a hardwood floor. The man was over him the instrument plunged into his neck, and this time he screamed, the world died out to a pinpoint and he dropped.

The man lowered the pointed end of the spike, retracting it back like an insulin needle.

Shadowed behind him Damon stared down at the heap of his brother on the floor. He turned to man, eyes a glare in the firelight. "What the hell did you do?"_  
_

"I just saved his life." The man returned.


	3. Chapter 3

**xxxxXxxxx**

"_You don't deserve this Stefan…"_

Damon Salvatore

Vampire Diaries: Episode "True Lies."

**xxxxXxxxx**

The air was hot from the fire and the closed windows of the tiny cabin blocked out any ventilation.

Damon watched the bald headed man stoke the fire burning in the stone fireplace with an iron poker. Stefan was still sprawled out unmoving on the floor, one hand out like he had fallen asleep drunk on a roadside waiting for alms.

"What did you just stick in my brother?" Damon tried to ignore the way Stefan was basically lying on the ground like a misplaced speed bump; but that was something that was kinda hard to do.

"Something to help him," the man responded. He set the fire poker back against the side of the fireplace, and stood back up. He was taller than Damon by a few inches, and wore a sweater so dark gray it was almost black, jeans and hiking boots caked in mud. A silver medallion hung around a leather cord around his neck. "He'll wake up soon, if that's what you're concerned about."

"Yeah no offense," Damon retorted. "But I've heard that line before." He knelt into a crouch by Stefan's shoulders, grasping one of his brother's arms and hauled him up over his shoulder in a firemen's carry.

"Quetsiyah is a lying, manipulative, bitch," the stranger returned.

"I've heard _that_ before too, mostly from, you know, _me._" Damon said around a grunt as he flung Stefan's dead weight off of him and back onto the military grade cot he'd been lying on earlier before he had woken up and freaked the hell out. His brother's body hit the canvas with a resonating thud, spilling dust into the shadow tinged air like a storm cloud, his head listing to one side like someone had released the strings on a marionette. Damon turned back around to face the other man, who was watching Damon as much as Damon was watching him. "The thing that I don't get is, why should I trust you? For all I know you're a psychotic ax murderer-"

"Your brother was a thread away from death Damon," the man returned, the flickers of the fire played across his jeans in crawling shadow. "If I was really your enemy I could have easily finished him off on that roadside instead of bringing him here-"

"Uh correction," Damon said, holding up one hand. "_I _brought him here-"

"And you let me lead you both here," the man cut off. "So obviously you trust me."

Damon fell silent with a snarky release of air. He had switched on the GPS in Stefan's phone a week ago, when it was obvious that New Stefan was the flight risk type of dick. And he had been following about 20 miles behind him the entire time he had been driving up the mountain. Damon's intent had been to vervain dagger Stefan and drag him back to the boarding house; Stefan with Amnesia was a combination that Damon didn't want to inflict on the world. But then, the truck happened, and Damon watched his brother light up like a firework, screaming like a dying animal, arms and legs fully engulfed, flailing in agony. The semi-truck was a lost cause before Damon was even out of his car, the driver, clearly dead inside his cab.

Damon had a fire extinguisher in his trunk, leftovers from the time Elena had flipped her switch and threatened to self-burn herself every five seconds.

He doused his brother down, but Stefan still looked like he'd been run through the meat grinder, and parboiled, and Damon had been mid yelling at him, when a man emerged from behind the semi truck's tank engulfed in flames. Why Damon hadn't instantly killed him was a question he was still asking himself, but it might have been the way the man's eyes shifted to a solid black, and the way he started speaking to Damon in something that sounded like Latin, but made no move to kill either of them.

So he had trekked two miles mile up hill, Stefan's dead weight slung him like a hunting trophy, following the guy until he reached this cabin a hundred yards or so off the roadside.

He had see no cars out front, no tracks on the dirt road indicating that there was any kind of vehicle travel. A dark roan horse was saddled and tied to a withering oak tree. It watched Damon as he came into the yard, eating a circle of dry grass. The man invited in both Damon, and Stefan, who had yet then to move, inside the cabin.

That had been two hours ago. Now Damon was standing with this anonymous stranger and both of them looked down at Stefan who still looked more dead than alive, which was a feat given that, technically he _was _dead.

Stefan's jeans were almost burned clean off, but stuck to his skin in a mass of congealed blood. His blue shirt didn't fare any better, and underneath all the blood Damon had discovered three cracked ribs, something out of alignment in his spine, and two broken femurs – all of which weren't healing at the normal vampire rate, because Stefan had been almost completely incinerated. Damon had forced his own blood down Stefan's throat, but by the time he had done so after they reached the cabin, his brother's skin looked half gray, like he was already starting to desiccate, or like he was starting to die.

That's when the man had brought out an all steel hypodermic needle, and was about to inject it in Stefan.

Who attacked him before he could.

Damon was actually kind of impressed that Stefan came back from the dead in such a grandiose way.

He turned away from his unconscious brother (Seriously, Stefan needed to stop getting involved in crazy shit) and back to man. "Since we're bonding, _I'm_ going to need to know your name, you know for tax deduction purposes."

"Neil," the man walked back to the fireplace, and stirred something in an iron pot that hung across the fire on a spit.

"Great," Damon retorted. "We're all Friended; now tell me what you shot up my brother and I _might _decide to keep your head attached to your neck." Damon watched Neil replace the spoon in his hand with a ladle and began to scoop out the contents of the pot into a small wooden bowl.

Neil stood up with the bowl in his hand and something dark red sloshed inside it. "Arnica root and the arterial blood of a gypsey, laced together with a spell. It will stabilize him until his body has a chance to heal from the trauma."

"Well aren't you _exceedingly _ helpful ," Damon snapped, it wasn't in his nature to just accept people at face value, especially creepy loner guys who lived on the side of the Appalachian Mountainside and cooked pots of what Damon could smell was defiantly _not _tomato soup.

"Would you have preferred the alternative?" Neil returned, causing Damon to scowl.

"What's in that?" Damon shot out, eyeing the redness in the bowl.

"What does it look like?" Neil returned in a voice as every bit as used to sarcasm as Damon was.

"You know, you should just leave the one liners to me buddy, and stick to the mystery chef thing." Damon insisted.

Neil glared at him with a stare that seemed to drop the temperature in the room to a frigid coolness. "I have manned this post long before the first Vampire came into existence boy, you will show me a little more respect or I will throw your brother back outside for the vultures to finish off!"

A wind blew hard and strong as Damon grabbed the arteries in Neil's neck and squeezed hard. Neil's choked and gagged, but then his eyes shifted to a solid black, and with a one handed push, he sent Damon splintering through a chair and half a wooden table top. Damon was back on his feet in a blurred fastness; in time to see Neil standing over Stefan, a stake hovering millimeters above his chest.

Damon's vision went blood read. "You are dead!-"

"I can move faster than it takes you to even _think_ about it Damon," Neil snapped back. "So I suggest you sit down or I will finish him off myself!"

Damon was half willing to take the chance, partly because nobody did things like that to Stefan, except _him_, and partly to just call Neil on his bluff. But then he felt a tenseness in the air, almost like a force that was alive and electrocuting it. Damon backed off, retreating back a few steps.

Neil lifted the stake away from Stefan, turning his head to Damon, face half shadowed, like the phantom of the opera. "I said _sit_."

A chair came hurtling from around the table and slammed into to Damon, throwing him down on it. Damon glared hostilely at Neil, but didn't stand back up because the shit was still too close to Stefan. Neil turned away from Damon's brother and walked over to him, the wooden bowl in his hand.

He set the bowl down on the table top, pulling out a copper bladed knife with white bone handle, holding it out, handle end to Damon. "I need your blood."

Damon stared up at him like he just was solicited for STD ridden sex. "Your timing is _impeccable_ for asking for favors Neil."

"The spell I did to heal Stefan was only temporary fix; it needs the blood of the bonded in order to seal it, _your blood_, Damon."

"Eww, don't be creepy," Damon had mastered the art of complaining while being staked down by supernatural forces, he prided himself on it.

"Do you really want to throw out sarcastic arguments?" Neil turned to him hostilely. "Or do you want your brother to _live?"_

In the half glow of the firelight Neil almost looked like Connor, the Hunter of the Five that Elena had killed almost 8 months ago. The had a similar complexion, similar build, but most notable, the same type of manic predatory look in their eyes that Damon had seen only on one other person – and that would be whenever he looked at himself in the mirror.

He snatched the knife from Neil's hand and slashed a jagged cut into his palm, making his hand into a fist and turned it upside down over the bowl. Blood dripped and pattered into the already red viscous liquid inside container, Neil started chanting in that weird Latin sounding dead language while Damon's blood continued to 'drip, drip, drip' into the bowl.

Once a fair amount of his blood had fallen, and a fair amount of chanting had come from Neil's mouth, Damon dipped a finger into it and licked off the redness like it was cake batter. "Little heady, too much of a bite on the aftertaste."

Neil looked almost impressed at Damon's sarcasm. "You just took a hell of a risk; for all you know that could've been laced with Vervain, or Werewolf venom."

"Yeah, well I'm the _fun brother,"_ Damon insisted, watching Neil draw up the blood in, of all things a 50 millimeter oral syringe, pulling back until the syringe was completely full.

"How do even _know_ Quetsiyah anyway? You keep referencing her like a book report-how do I know you're not striking a little witchy deal with her?"

"You _don't_," Neil stated simply, like that's all there was too it. "But I'm a _gypsey,_ not a witch. It is true that some of my people sided with the witches back in Macedonia and Greece, those hungry for power, but most of us steered clear to keep our magic from corruption-"

Damon watched as Neil stepped back over to the cot where Stefan was sprawled, still unmoving, and lowered the syringe to Stefan's lips, drawing down on the plunger, pushing the blood spelled mixture into his mouth.

"So is this a one-time treatment, or am I gonna have to bring him back up here next week for a booster shot?" Damon called from the chair where he was still sitting. He wasn't forced down, he felt no bindings or spell that kept him to the chair. It was just 150 years of Vampire instinct that made him decide it would be better to observe, not because he wasn't faster than Neil – if it came to that, well, Damon had out sped more than his fair share of things who thought that they were better than him. It was something like knowing that a pathway dropped off into a jagged sheer fall moments before it happened, something a witch would call 'psychic' but Damon wouldn't label, because he didn't label things.

"That all depends," Neil said, almost half the blood mixture gone into Stefan's mouth. "On whether or not your connection with your brother is as strong as Quetsiyah fears. Don't look so shocked," Neil returned catching the tick of Damon's head from the corner of his eyesight. "There have been rumors for years amongst the Travelers about you two. No one knew your exact identities- Quetseyah didn't divulge that to anyone, like I said, she's a manipulative bitch, she had her secrets. But she did circulate stories to try sway more of us to join the witches' sides. Stories about Silas newest shadow being _different_ than the others, linked to Amarah's doppelgänger yes, but _bonded_ to someone else. She was afraid that such a combination would make Silas harder to kill, so she wiped Stefan's memories in order to make him forget all about you."

Damon made a face, like the blood/spell combination he had just tasted had gone rancid in his stomach. "Okay, this is all getting a _little _too Vampcesty for my taste."

Neil did not look up from his task this time as he spoke, moving the blood slower in the syringe, like it had started to coagulate inside the plastic. "You joke about it, but you do not deny its existence," this time Neil raised his head to Damon when he talked. "I know all about you Damon Salvatore; the Vampire in love with your brother's girl in double life times. You claim it is the center of your very existence, that every move you do are for Amara's doppelgangers, but Quetsiyah sees it differently, so differently that she _fears _it, a 2000 year old witch, afraid of _infants. _And _here_ you are, proving that she is exactly. right." Neil ended there, the remark wove though the air like the cables on a rope suspension bridge.

Damon was about to retort with something poetic, like 'bite me, or better yet-' at which point, he would bite through Neil's jugular when his ears picked up the sound of something he hadn't heard in almost 100 years at night.

The sounds of horse hooves on the ground.

Neil dropped the syringe, still almost one fourth full onto the cot by Stefan's head. He stood up and walked over to the fireplace, drawing a double blade curved sword down from over it. He moved to the window and peaked out of the dark stained tarpaulin that served as a curtain, dropping it back down a second later and stepped out the door.

Damon made to follow him, but he found the door not able to open, like it had been nailed shut, or rather _spelled_ shut. Damon even tried throwing a chair at the thing, then the table, but nothing happened. "Damnit." He beat on the door in frustration, drawing back the tarp curtain.

The sky outside was still dark, barely starting to lighten around the edges. The old horse outside was still tied to the tree, but she whinnied and moved around her rope like something was spooking her.

And Damon saw why.

Five horses, each of them a solid midnight black, with shaggy manes stood in a line at the end of the drive. Their riders were cloaked in the same black color, faces not visible in the night.

Neil stood there, his sword and an old tin lantern clutched in his hand, he was shouting, so were the riders. But even though Damon could hear it, he couldn't understandwhat they were saying.

He dropped back the curtain and picked up the bowl Neil had left on the table. He walked it over to Stefan, adding the remaining contents of the syringe to the bowl.

"Drink up baby bro, nap time's over." Damon opened Stefan's mouth and poured the bowl's entire contents down his throat. Some of the thick blood, and god knows what else, spilled out because Stefan wasn't exactly with it enough to swallow. Realistically, Stefan could drown, but Damon never gave much thought for pragmatics. He sealed his hand over Stefan's mouth, and ran a hard knuckled grip down his brother's neck to force it down him.

Nothing happened for a few seconds, then a full minute.

"_Any time now_," Damon retorted in a singsong version of his annoyed sarcasm, but his tone wasn't all sarcasm.

Before he was able to fully give into what his tone actually _was, _Stefan jolted like he'd been electrocuted, coughing and spitting blood mixture into Damon's face when he removed his hand from his mouth.

"Stef-"Damon made a grunted noise of displeasure, and wiped the sticky crap from his eyes.

Stefan was now bolt upright on the cot, staring at him. _"Damon?"_ He tried to sit up but wound up wincing with a guttural sound more than actual moving. His dark eyes moved around the cabin like he had just woken up in a taxidermist's office, ready to be skinned. "What happened?"

"Cliff notes version, you didn't die because of a gypsy spell." Damon wiped the last bits of blood off of his face, flicking the droplets away with his hands. "Long abridged version to follow when we get out of here," he stared at his brother. "You able to stand yet?"

Stefan didn't question as to what Damon meant, he could feel the broken bones in his body. "Yeah," he placed one foot on the ground, and it hurt like a bitch, but he was able to somewhat bear his weight on it. "Yeah I think so."

"Good," Damon grabbed Stefan's hand and levered him up on his feet, and Stefan didn't protest, though he was giving off a lot of vibes that he preferred _not _to do things to standing right now.

As Damon let go of Stefan's hand, Stefan noticed something for the first time. "Where's my ring?"

Damon glanced down at Stefan's hand, the digit he normally wore his daylight ring had nothing on it. "Damnit!"

The sound of a snorting horse echoed outside, followed by a high whinny, followed by echoes of the same sound. Stefan's expression shifted into the same kind of confusion Damon had when he first heard the horses.

Damon was at the window in under three seconds, pulling back the tarp curtain. Stefan was a few seconds behind him, his movements less stylized because of his broken bones, his stumbling hand sending the tarp waving back like someone had torn a chunk out of the window.

The five horses still stood at the base of the road, their cloaked riders arguing in high pitched voices in a language that neither Salvatore could understand.

"What the hell is going on?" Stefan stared at nightmarish looking horses, their manes were so shaggy it looked like pieces of their flesh had been ripped from their bodies and hung in frayed chunks off their necks. A man was standing in front of the horses, slashing with the long blade of a sword. One of the horses reared, and its rider's hood became dislodged, revealing the face of a woman with a mass of dark black curls. She wore long black riders' boots and she drew a knife from one of them.

"Long version," Damon returned. "I have _no_ idea."

Stefan moved to the door, trying to open it like Damon, but, like Damon, was unable to do so.

"Oh, and just FYI," Damon said to Stefan's frustration on the doors. "The guy conducting the evil horse orchestra down there is a gypsy and did some sort of spell on the door, my guess is he also took your daylight ring."

Stefan released the door and stared at Damon. "When were you going to tell me?"

"_When_ I found a way around it!" Damon retorted.

A cry cut through the night. Damon and Stefa watched as the female rider was thrown from her horse. She wailed in that dead sounding language, slashing at the man Damon knew to be Neil with her sword. The woman looked unhurt, but her horse lay on its side, its throat slit, and even in the darkness Damon saw that its blood was black.

Neil shouted at the horsemen, pointing at the dead animal with the tip of his sword. The other riders looked like they were prepared to fight, the woman spat and swung her sword blade, but she seemed unable to hit Neil. She screamed horrendously into the night. A rider pulled her back up on her death black horse and they sped back down the way they came.

Neil moved in a blur of speed so fast Damon had a hard time tracking him. He was back through the door in the same speed, the blade in his hand stained black like a still drying Rorschach ink test.

Neil flicked his eyes over to Stefan. "Good, you're awake."

Stefan took a defensive stance, he'd seen too much crazy shit in the last 48 hours to just accept a guy wielding a sword who had spelled him into a cabin he couldn't remember walking into. "Who the hell are you?"

"Ordinarily I would take offense to that," Neil said. "But Quetsiyah blasted away your memories so I won't kill you for your insolence."

"Who the hell were those people?" Damon cut into Neil's rant.

"The Riders," Neil said the name in all capitals, giving it a dark, thin, smoky quality. "Rogue Gypsies from the Other Side in league with Quetsehyah to try and find Silas."

"Where's my ring?" Stefan cut in, seeming to not care about the revelation that Neil dropped on them, or the fact that he had just woken up in Neil's cabin, or about who Neil _was_ in general.

Neil reached into the pocket of his dark jeans and held out Stefan's daylight ring. "I had to show it to them, _away_ from you, or they would use it to track you."

"Give it to me." Stefan held out his hand.

"You are a _petulant_ little thing." Neil returned in a voice like Stefan was a child who had wandered into his home. "Or do you not remember that part?"

Stefan closed the gap between him and Neil, walking at a human pace, but slow, lethal. "I said _give _it to me."

Neil stared at Stefan. "You remember." It wasn't a question.

Damon made a confused face, looking from Neil to Stefan, but mostly to Stefan. "You _remember?"_

"Everything." Stefan's remark was directed at Neil, dark eyes staring at him unblinkingly.

"Then you're as good as dead," Neil moved past Stefan; wiping the black blood off of the sword blade with a rag.

Damon watched how Neil was careful not to touch the blood as he did this, throwing the cloth into the flames. He set the sword back over the mantle.

"Technically I've _been_ dead for 165 years already-" Stefan said to Neil's remark.

"Brilliant timing remembering the Vampire sarcasm Stef," Damon side barred.

"Quetsiyah may want you alive to serve her ends," Neil's face crawled in shadow and flames. "But you were just hit with 150 years' worth of tortured memories all at the same time – this was not arbitrary. The last three months alone are enough to kill you. Quetsiyah knows this; she let you regain your memories because she wants you _weak_," Neil approached Stefan in the half light, like a warrior facing another on a battlefield, deciding if he was worthy enough to fight. "So mad with the pain of these memories that you _beg_ her to take them away."

Stefan eyed Neil, almost calmly, like he was surveying a piece of property he wanted to buy. "And what do you want? You obviously have a stake in this or else you would have let me burn to death on the roadside."

"For over a thousand years I have manned this post," Neil looked around his cabin, the fire flickering, the bowls and spoons scattered on the table made of polished bones. "Not always in this location, before this, Wales, before that, Greece, Gaul; ever since Silas took the immortality spell we have watched; maintaining a veil of secrecy to keep the witch away. But never in 2000 years has Silas' shadow been another supernatural being, it puts a rent in the spell work keeping our locations hidden from Quetsiyah – the minute you step out of these doors the spell around this place will break. I let you live, Stefan-" Neil's eyes bored into Stefan like screws through a wall. "To keep Silas's powers in check, but I'm not about to let you leave here."

The air grew heavy, not from anything known, like the fire cracking hot in the stone fire place, or the smell of the black blood that still hung cloyingly in the air despite having been burned. It was instead from something electric coming through the gazes of both Damon and Stefan Salvatore.

"And what if we don't agree to your little plan?"

Stefan's shifted a look over to Damon at his remark.

"See," Damon said in almost a lazy way, stepping over to Neil. "No one gets to order around my brother but _me,_ and since you're _not_ me, we have a _little_ bit of a problem."

"The spell on the cabin is cast on my life force Damon," Neil retorted in same manner one would describe why the sun would never set in the east. "It will not break unless I'm dead – despite your bloody thirsty reputation, even you don't possess the ability to kill me-"

Neil's voice cut out in a gurgle. He glanced down and saw the iron fire poker protruding from his gut. He turned around slowly and had only a minute to stare at Stefan in raged hatred before the other torqued his neck, severing his spine. Neil dropped to the floor in a thudded heap.

Damon stared down at the motionless heap on the ground, at the unnatural angle of Neil's neck. "Nice job with the self-control Stef."

"Where do you think I learned it from Damon?" Stefan returned.

"So, _all_ your memories are back?" Damon questioned, almost in disbelief. "How much did you pay for that hunk of junk motorcycle you drive?"

"I don't know Damon, you bought it for me, so you tell me-" Stefan threw the fire poker on the ground by Neil's motionless body. "Look, I don't know how long he'll stay dead, so can we do this when neither one of us is stuck here anymore?"

Damon kicked Neil's motionless hand on the floor, and snatched Stefan's bulky daylight ring off the floor boards and tossed it to him, walking over to the front door, grasping the old copper knob, and this time, the door opened without resistance into a night gone gray with early morning.

He looked back up to his brother. "Sounds like a plan."


	4. Chapter 4

**xxxxXxxxxx**

"_The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places." _

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

**xxxxxXxxxx**

The footpath back down to the paved road was bumpy to Damon, even without Stefan's dead weight slung over his shoulder. The horse outside watched them leave in agitation, circling around and around the tree it was tied too like it could sense what had just occurred. Damon almost felt sorry for the beast, not knowing what its fate would be now, but he was a little too busy worrying about his own fate.

The packed dirt path finally became paved road, broken and cracked, and lined with scraggly bushes, and even scragglier trees.

"My car's about two miles down the mountainside," Damon said. He hadn't been running at Vampire speed, he'd simply been walking fast, Stefan keeping up with the same pace.

But after another 10 feet or so Stefan suddenly lurched forward, a pain grinding into his chest, halting him in his tracks.

"What's wrong with you?"

Damon's question was snark wrapped in concern wrapped in sarcasm. But Stefan had barely two seconds to acknowledge it before the pain in his chest exploded outward, feeling like for all the world that he'd been staked in the chest.

**[**_"Hello my shadow self." Silas twisted the stake in deeper, shoving Stefan inside the safe like he was a body already dead._**]**

The pain became blinding, throwing him hard onto his knees.

"Stefan!" Damon watched his brother fall, eyes becoming shocked confusion when Stefan started to vomit large amounts of water onto the dark asphalt. "_Stefan!"_ Damon had a hold on Stefan's shoulder, gripping the fabric of his shirt already half gone to shreds from the fire. Stefan writhed, still expelling water from his lungs at alarming rate, especially since he hadn't drown in over three weeks.

The sounds of horse's hooves raised Damon's head up and over to the dark roadway. Even with his night vision he was unable to see anything. But the sounds grew louder, closer.

Damon grabbed his brother and blurred them both in a sprinted run into the thicket of bushes on the edge of the road. Stefan was still gagging, Damon placed a hand over his mouth to keep the sound of his vomiting muffled, allowing only just a sliver of a gap to allow him to breathe. He peeked up through the bushes to the roadside. The bushes were low to the ground, practically forcing Damon on top of his brother to keep them both out of view of whoever was on the road.

Stefan groaned like every breath was sheer agony, but Damon could feel his brother clenching his jaw shut through his hand. Damon lowered his grip, and there was a stare that passed between them, as Stefan fell silent through the pain.

Damon pulled himself into more of a crouch, looking up through a hole in the branches at the shaggy black forelegs of a horse.

Damon never told anyone about one fact about himself; he was a Tolkien fan, particularly Lord of the Rings. In The Fellowship of the Ring, there was the scene of Frodo and the other Hobbits fleeing from the Black Riders, a band of evil horsemen. The approaching black 'clip clop' of hooves threw Damon's mind to that image unconsciously. The Riders wore similar cloaks, faces hidden in them almost entirely, the only exception was they didn't look like skeletons.

The horse nearest to Damon's head snorted, actually made his hair ruffle, its breath smelled like rotting flesh. Damon threw his head back just as pair of eyes peaked through the hole he had just been looking through.

A voice hissed, the woman whose horse Neil had killed. Damon still had no idea what the hell she was saying, but she sounded _pissed._

Beside him Stefan was silently breathing through such a tight grit of his teeth that it looked like he was shaking.

Damon was about to just screw it all and start ripping primordial riders' heads off, but Stefan gave the slightest shake of his head, like he had read his mind.

Even though every instinct told Damon to screw his brother's pain induced wimpiness, some deeper instinct said that Stefan was right. It was the same kind of instinct that kept Damon in the chair when Neil had administered the blood to Stefan.

Damon grumbled a _'fine'_ look to Stefan, half ready to take a page out of Tolkien and throw a stone further up the mountain, but then distraction came on its own in the modern sound of a low flying single engine plane flying overhead in the darkness.

The Riders glanced up like they were now just noticing it was 2013 and such a thing as surveying planes existed. A male voice shouted in that weird sounding language, and horse hooves began to retreat past the bushes, heading up the way Damon and Stefan had just came from.

Damon waited for a count of ten before emerging from the shrubbery, looking up the roadside, but the forms of the Riders were long gone.

"What the hell was that?" Stefan asked behind him.

Damon whipped around at the sound of Stefan's voice. He had come out from the bushes, a branch was stuck haphazardly in his perfect hair; and it was this fact more than anything else that prompted Damon's next remark: "What the hell was _that?"_

Stefan made a grunted groan. "I don't know," he dropped both hands to hands on his knees "It felt like someone staked me," he groped at his chest, but there was no wound, but the smell of rancid bile still hung bitterly on his tongue. "It's like all my memories are trying to torpedo at me all at once."

"Well get it together," Damon insisted, he jerked Stefan up by his shoulder, but not roughly. "We need to get down the mountainside before the supernatural equestrian club decides to come back this way," he shoved Stefan for a few steps. "Go."

Stefan didn't retaliate with words; his shoulder vanished from Damon's grip, and he became a blur. Damon turned back to the path they had just traveled, then followed Stefan just as quickly.

An enormous black scorch mark was painted across the road midway to mile marker 78, long and ringed in a circle, but other than pieces of twisted metal, there was no sign of the truck that Stefan had crashed into.

Stefan came to a stop where the guard rail was splintered apart like it had been run into by a vehicle, or by two. But the hole seemed larger than it should for even that kind of violence – like something had _fallen_ down the mountainside. Peering over the rail Stefan saw a hunk of twisted charred blackness, barely recognizable as a vehicle anymore.

Something stabbed through his eyes, and when he opened his eyes again, he saw an image at the corner of his vision.

Giuseppe Salvatore was standing behind him, pale, but solid, dressed in the same clothes he had worn the night Stefan had killed him.

Stefan jerked back. "Father-"

Giuseppe didn't talk, his voice was a series of choking sounds. Pallid hands reached out for him, blood gurgling out of jagged holes in his neck.

Stefan backed away from those reaching hands; in his movement he lost sense of geography, and one of his boots slipped backwards on the stone and he slid down the mountainside in a backwards tumble.

He free fell like this for three seconds before he managed to snag a hand onto loose tree root, dangling thousands of feet in the open air. Another hand grabbed his, yanking back up so fast his ears popped. He turned again, his dad watching him with eyes full of misery.

"Father, no," Stefan backed away again. "I'm sorry-"

The stabbing in his head reached a peak level; he groaned out a scream, groping out for something, his hands connecting to leather.

"Damon!" Stefan's grunted scream grew more agonizing, as images of him biting through his father's flesh blew through is mind like a bomb, as he watched like a third person from across the room. "I didn't know how strong I was," his screams echoed like jagged pants. The image of his father stood over him, eyes hateful. "I didn't mean to kill him-," he felt the ground rush up to meet him, and his head scraped the pavement. "Make it stop!"

"Stef-," Damon's breath was right on his face, hands on his shoulders. He hauled Stefan up, flipped him over and shoved a hand into his chest, squeezing hard. "Dad's dead! He killed us first remember?" Damon's hand twisted harder, it was either this, or punch Stefan in the face, and this was more effective. "It's over, it's been over for 145 years, let. It. _go." _ Damon's dark eyes locked on Stefan as he forcefully removed his hand.

Stefan gasped, the image of their father wasn't there anymore when he picked his head off the pavement.

Damon grasped Stefan's hand, coated in his own blood, and hauled him once again to his feet. "Get in the car-"

Damon released his brother and walked over to where his powder blue convertible sat untouched on the side of the road less than 20 yards away from where the truck had exploded. Whoever had knocked the semi over the mountain obviously hadn't considered Damon's car a threat; and Damon wasn't about to start questioning it.

He opened the door and got into the driver's seat, seconds before Stefan tumbled through the passenger side with a squeak of the door.

Damon wasn't delicate with the way he leveled the gas down to the floor, taking the winding mountain road at speeds that would have killed someone without his coordination.

Mile markers 77-74 blurred past them in this way. But on the approach to mile marker 72, a marked with a 'dangerous curve ahead' sign, the roadway became blocked by the sight of four death black horsemen, and in front of them Quetsiyah, as immoveable as a statue, in a bright red dress that flapped like a Legion's flag, her eyes glinted coldly. She raised her hands, and the right front tire of the Chevelle was blown out, lurching the car dangerously into the guard rail, shooting sparks into the night like rain.

"Judgmental _bitch!" _Damon cursed as he righted the convertible, with a forceful jerk. Damon threw a glance at his brother. "Do you trust me?"

A look came across Stefan's face, "Is this a trick question?"

"_Yep," _Damon popped the word like he was blowing a piece of chewing gum. "Stefan Salvatore is back He sped the car up to its maximum speed on the odometer. "Jump on three-"

Quetsiyah raised her hands higher and the windshield cracked right down the center.

"Three-!" Damon threw the car into fourth gear and accelerated.

The convertible banked a hard right, right into the mountain side, the impact sent the car flipping over, and rolling end over end, metal flying apart into fiery pieces.

Some of the debris clattered around the horses' hooves, two of them spooked, but the cloaked figures reigned them in and stood their ground, Quetsiyah along with them. The car came to a stop, on its roof in a twisted mass of metal.

The witch approached the twisted mass of metal, flames flickering inside the interior. She kicked aside the flaming debris of the front door with a laced heeled stiletto boot, but the car was empty. Quetsiyah raised her eyes to the sky now being swallowed by morning. She whipped her head back around, dark hair flapping around her like the wings of a crow. When she turned back towards the horsemen, her view was blocked, by Stefan.

"Looking for me?" His hand closed on her throat, and he squeezed, hard.

Quetsiyah gasped, choking. One hand tried to remove Stefan's hand from her neck, the other one was at her side, and she clenched it.

Stefan released her as a loud buzzing pain blasted through his head and landed him onto his knees.

"I thought you were going to be different," Quetsiyah squeezed her hand harder like she was juicing an orange. "Turns out I wasn't wrong," she laughed, a low rumbling sound. "You're different all right, Stefan," She drew her hand upward in a claw formation.

The pain was ten times worse than what Stefan had experienced inside his own head, the reality of it all was so much sharper, so much more brutal than anything his subconscious could have imagined.

"Stop it," Stefan pleaded, the pain too parasitic to make him not. "Stop it, please! "He grabbed at his head like he was trying to claw it apart.

"You're the one who chose this Stefan," A pair of spiked heels clicked in Stefan's direction, and the face of the Quetseyah emerged through the fog of Stefan's pain, eyes blazing copper like melted coins. "You picked your old life over oblivion remember?" She traced the flesh on the back of his neck with a long fingernail, almost like a lover's caress. "I can make it stop," she leaned down right next to his face. "Just tell me, and this can all go away."

A high whinny of a horse pierced the air like a scream, whipping Quetseyah's head around. Damon had somehow managed to relieve one of the Riders of their sword and held it in his tight in his grip. "Enough with the Fatal Attraction, witch." Damon held the knife out towards the cloaked Rider.

The hood lowered, and the face of the woman whose horse had died at the very same kind of blade Damon grasped emerged from it. Her eyes were so dark they were almost black. "You cannot kill me foolish boy!" she hissed in an English that was heavily accented.

"Don't have too," Damon drew the sword up and down so fast that the movements were blurred, slicing through the Rider's left hand, then the right. She screamed as they fell to the ground, wrists now stumps of pulsating blood.

"Release my brother," Damon hissed in full heated anger at Quetsiyah. "Or I keep doing things to your friends that won't grow back!"

Quetsiyah hissed in an angry rage. "Remember what I said about you and me being the conflict that makes _all of this_ interesting, Damon?" she stood up, the multicolored bangle bracelets on her wrist slid down her arm as she kept one hand still drawn towards Stefan who was still writing on the ground.

Damon blurred to Quetsiyah so fast that the witch didn't have time to act before his hands were on her throat. "Remember what I said about going back to hell?" He squeezed harder, then harder than that.

Damon grunted a scream as something tore through his head, dropping down to his knees, he felt the capillaries in his eyes burst apart like dams and blood ran like tears down his skin.

Questeyiah held both Salvatore brothers in a spelled hold, hissing something in Ancient Greek, with a clicking tongue.

A Rider charged forward on his horse, sword gleaming drawn, aimed in a deadly accurate shot at the back of Damon's neck.

"No!" Stefan saw all this through the agony ripping through the sinews of his brain. He climbed to his feet, each step felt like dying. He ran at the Rider, plunging his hand deep into the chest cavity of his horse, ripping out a massive, dark, still pumping heart from the horse's chest. The horse whinnied a ghastly dying cry and lurched sickeningly to one side, plunging over the guard rail, the Rider's scream echoing over the beast's as both plummeted thousands of feet below. Stefan threw himself on the only remaining horse, tearing through its neck with his fangs, pulling the animal down sideways in a dying scream. The horses' blood burned like acid, he dropped back, mouth caked in black trickles of blood, crashing onto the ground in a strangled cry.

"_Stefan,"_ Damon grunted out, hearing Stefan repeat scream after scream, and it sawed through places Quetseyiah with all her magic couldn't touch. His brother was _dying_, dying for real, right in front of him.

"I will spare Stefan," Quetsiyah stood above both of them in superiority that was 2000 years old. "Silas must remain in check until he is killed, but you Damon, you have no part in this-" her words were snide, and angry, scoffing at him like he was a stain on the asphalt. "You're worthless."

"_Damon,"_ Stefan gasped out to Damon who looked like he was trying to claw his ears off, stains of dark blood streaking down his face. "_Do you trust me?"_

Stefan gathered together every last reserve of energy he could find in him and threw himself on Quetsiyah, biting into her neck, spitting out the dark black blood of the Rider's horse into the holes his fangs made in her flesh.

Quetsiyah jerked backed with a horrible scream, breaking through her concentration, ending her spell on them.

Stefan seized the moment. He shoved her to the ground and ran at his brother, grabbing Damon's shoulders and leapt over the hole in the guard rail, plummeting them both down the mountain.


	5. Chapter 5

**xxxxxXxxxx**

"_Tell me the Third Thing.."_

~Bonnie Bennett

"Vampire Diaries" Episode: "Death and the Maiden"

**xxxxxXXxxxxx**

The sun burned in full morning where they landed, 500 feet below on a packed gravel grade for trucks gone out of control on the mountain. The gravel had been blown apart like a bomb surrounding two bodies. Stefan was the first thrown awake, coughing the dust and gravel away from his lungs, already aching, something horribly wrong with his throat, it felt corroded, boiled.

"Damon," Stefan's voice was reedy noises and dryness. He flung himself at the still form of his older brother, who was on his back, not 5 feet away from where he was. Damon was still, streaks of blood stained down on his face. "Damon-Hey!" Stefan shook him, and when nothing happened, he could feel panic set in. "Come on man, not now!"

Stefan wished for one moment that he didn't have memories of Damon, because then he wouldn't care about this, about any of it. But it couldn't be turned off anymore, it throbbed through every part of him that connected him to his brother.

Stefan shook Damon harder. _"Damon!"_

Damon's head listed to one side, but he didn't move after that. Stefan bit through his wrist and shoved the bleeding mass into Damon's mouth, waiting, his mind screaming.

The blood tricked into Damon's mouth, _patter, patter, patter_.

Eleven patters later, Damon's eyes flew open and he coughed massively, working the cough into a groan.

Stefan fell back with heavy exhausted breath, watching as Damon sat back up, gaping at him.

"Stefan," Damon stared at the state of the road, then the state of himself. He levered himself back up to his feet, coughing out bits of gravel dust with each breath.

Damon turned a look that was pissed and murderous, fully onto Stefan. "Next time _wait_ for me to answer before you in enact your brilliant plan to hurl me off a mountainside!-"

Stefan had propelled himself to his feet during Damon's rant, then slowed his pace down to one deliberate step at a time. He set both his hands on Damon's shoulders, then both his arms around his brother.

Damon's remark fell, like he just did, off a cliff. His arms remained down at his sides until they reciprocated the last few seconds before Stefan pulled away.

"Thanks," Stefan said to his brother. "For-"

"I'm going to stop you there Stef," Damon interrupted. "The whole bromance/oozing sentiment isn't really my style, now that you have your memory back you should know about that-"

Stefan managed a laugh, that dry '_not used to doing it sound'_, but sounding just like _him._ "Thank you, Damon."

Damon volleyed back with nothing more than a silent look before casting his eyes up to the higher elevation of the mountain. The pale blue sky of the morning revealed the trees and plants that had just been darkness and shadow up until that moment. He saw the guard rail up two elevation points on the mountain twisted open like a vivisected animal; and also what was left of his powder blue Chevelle, torn apart like a beetle splattered on the roadside.

"I'm not a mechanic, but I'm guessing my car is _pretty_ much useless," He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out his iPhone. "At least _one _of us didn't obliterate his phone-" The iPhone screen was cracked in a jagged diagonal and the volume button had been ripped off, but it actuallystill worked despite all of that.

"Who are you calling?" Stefan threw out, the question so seemingly normal it felt weird saying it.

"Reinforcements," Damon hit a speed dial number and waited for the call to connect, the phone only showed one bar, but he figured Karma owned them a shit load. "Unless you want to walk back to Virginia."

"You know she's going to wonder why you didn't call sooner," Stefan returned, even without the return of his memories he would've known who the 'reinforcement' was.

"I was a little busy bailing out Amnesiac Dooshbag You Stefan," Damon returned right back. He had actually tried to call Elena back in Neil's cabin, but the place was so secluded he couldn't get any form of signal. "She'll understand." The call connected.

"Hey there."

Damon said this slowly and with the sarcasm that Stefan finally remembered outside of being just annoying. Stefan could here Elena's returning: '_You said you were going to call when you found Stefan!' _ blasting through Damon's even without the aid of his enhanced hearing.

"Yeah," Damon said slowly emphasizing each letter of the one syllable word, his eyes raised up to Stefan. "About that-"

**xxxxXxxx**

Damon gave the black puddle of blood that stained the road like a lake a wide berth. The Riders dead horses had all vanished, as well as the last remaining Rider, as well as Quetseyah. The black stains were the only indications that any of the last two hours had happened. His car lay on its roof like an overturned bug, pieces of twisted metal and glass everywhere.

It was now nearly nine in the morning, and so far only one semi hand been spotted traveling up the mountain. The rig had stopped at the sight of the overturned car and asked if they needed any help. Damon had compelled the driver to turn around and put out a report on his CV radio about the mountain road being closed.

Stefan stood on the other side of the car, staring at the black stains on the road. "Where did they all go?"

Damon crouched by the pretzeled front door, opening it, breaking the entire door off in the maneuver. "You know my motto, don't question the absence of evil." He threw the door aside like scrap metal, reaching in the car to snag his leather jacket that still hung on what was left of the driver's seat. He stood back up and shook out glass from the folds of the material.

"Here," he tossed the jacket to Stefan. "You look like road kill."

Stefan caught the jacket. "Thanks," He and Damon were around the same height and build so the jacket fit over the shredded remains of his shirt. His jeans were a lost cause, his blood the only thing keeping the scraps of denim on his legs, but he preferred half functioning pants to no pants at all, especially in front Damon. He rubbed at a particularly large stain of blood blooming on his right upper thigh.

"Is Humpty Dumpty putting himself back together again?" Damon attempted a quip, but it sounded more like concern.

The fall from the mountainside had broken Stefan's legs again, but they were healing faster than they had before. They still hurt, but it was a healing kind of pain, not the sharp, death grip acuity of before. "Whatever Neil did back at the cabin, its working."

"Too bad you snapped his neck, we could've made millions on a supernatural cure-all." Damon returned. He stepped back around the black stain of blood, the tip of his boot hitting the pavement by the stain, and a huge chunk of asphalt crumbed to dust, creating a pothole 3 feet around in diameter and almost twice as deep. "How is it that _you're_ not doing that?"

"I don't know," Stefan answered. "And since I'm _alive,_ more-or-less, I'm not going to question it." He came around the now, crater, walking the same foot path as Damon and stood beside his brother.

"Guess you're going to file that away for later journal scribbling's, along with how _pissed_ Quetsiyah is going to be at you for giving her the bad kind of hickey," Damon patted Stefan on the shoulder. "Don't worry, Stef, I got your back."

"She tried to kill you too Damon," Stefan reminded.

"Yeah because I was trying to _help _you Stefan," Damon returned. "She's vindictive and judgey about 2,000 years' worth of crap she wasn't even around to see."

"She's been on the Other Side for the last two centuries, she's had a lot of time to scheme," Stefan threw back.

"As if we didn't have enough to deal with," Damon bit back with snark. "We had to add your Psychotic Super Fan to the list."

"You know _nothing _actually happened between me and her," Stefan insisted. "At least nothing that wasn't all just a one sided mantra in her head."

"You've got your memories back Brother, which means you should remember that you overshare." Damon turned his eyes over to the stretch of road that led up from the mountain, watching.

"Why'd you do it?"

Damon tracked his brother's voice back up to his brother. "Do what?"

"Come after me," Stefan replied, sticking his hands into the pockets of Damon's jacket. The weather was actually starting to warm up from the rising sun, but not by much because it was November and they were 1000 feet above sea level, and with as many injuries as he had sustained, Stefan was grateful for the extra covering. "I mean I wasn't exactly subtle about wanting you out of my life-"

"Let's not do the whole 'reunited at last speech' Stefan," Damon insisted. "It's all too cliché."

"My memories are back like you say Damon," Stefan returned. "So I know that you like to use sarcasm and one liners as avoidance tactics-"

"Kind of like the way brooding eyebrows and hair grooming are your avoidance tactics," Damon shot back.

"Why'd you save me?" Stefan finally asked the question flat out, a chilly wind gusted by the car, traveling up both of them and out into the open air.

"Why _wouldn't_ I?" Damon retaliated, the last word, biting, hard, and full of something that dulled the anger in his voice. "You've been a memory wiped dick for the last few weeks, but I wasn't just going to let you die in a fiery crash." Damon took a moment for pause, looking to the road again for just a moment, then back where he was supposed to look. "I already let you die over and over again for three months in a safe – I figured I owed you."

The look in Stefan's eyes intensified. He still felt the confinement of the metal box, the water entering his lungs, the agony of it repeating in a compendium of absolute physical pain. It left him wanting his memories to not be there anymore, if it meant that he couldn't remember _that._

"It didn't matter that we agreed on not seeing each other for 60 year increments-" A moment for Damon to sigh, but absent of one came and went. "The point is, you're still my brother Stefan," Damon locked eyes with him. "I should've noticed something was wrong – I should've been the one to find you."

The guilt that Damon felt for basically leaving his little brother to drown for three months, and the longing Stefan for not wanting to have come out of the ordeal alone blew past each other in the silence that kept them from being spoken.

The sound of an engine rumbled upwards from the road, a familiar engine to Damon's ears, Stefan's too.

Damon and Stefan turned and watched as Elena's red Mini Cooper crested the curve in the road. The car came to a stop a few feet in front of the wreckage of Damon's car.

Elena threw the car into park and ran out at an inhuman speed. "Stefan!"

Caroline climbed out of the passenger seat, and was two seconds behind Elena. Damon had told them both over the phone about Stefan's memory returning, so, while both girls looked shocked, it was for other, more obvious reasons.

Elena threw her arms around Stefan, at the same time Damon drew a breath to stop what he wanted to say because he saw the way Stefan's face lost, for just a second, the haunted look in his eyes.

"Ease up Elena," Damon told his girlfriend. "Internal injuries."

At Damon's words Elena pulled back from Stefan, "Oh God," Elena held him at arm's length, taking in all blood staining his clothes, noticing the way he wore Damon's jacket "Stefan-"

"What happened to him?" This question came from Caroline, directed at Damon. Her blonde hair was the same color as the edge of the sky painted in the light of the morning sun, and her green eyes stared at him.

"A better question might be what _didn't_ happen to him," Damon insisted.

Caroline cocked her head at Damon, looked half ready to kill him, and half ready to perform some sort of first aid on Stefan that she didn't know.

Before Stefan could utter a counter to Damon's response, Elena glanced behind her and finally caught sight of the overturned burned out husk of Damon's Chevelle.

"_What_ happened?" Elena dircted the question at both of them, eyes still locked on the car. "It looks like the car was thrown over the mountain," she whipped her head back to face them.

"Not the car," Damon returned.

Elena's eyes widened. "What are you-?" Her eyes went wider as she started connecting the blood stained clothes, the burned out car, the holes in the guard rail. "Are you saying that you," Elena turned from Damon to Stefan. "That _both_ of you were thrown off the mountain-"

"Jumped," Damon corrected. "More like a skydive really," He glanced past Elena to his brother who glanced back at him. "Ask Stefan."

"Wait," Caroline interjected, her eyes as wide as Elena's. "You both _jumped_ off a _mountain?" _ She stared at Stefan and Damon like they had gone mad during the time they'd been away.

"I was thrown off, "Damon insisted, like he was correcting the wrong answer on a test. "To clear up that technicality, but its not like dying by Tessa and her evil minions was a better option."

Caroline looked both baffled and horrified. "Tessa tried to _kill_ you?" She looked down over the hole in the guard rail at the very smooth, very hard rock hundreds of feet below. "How far did you _fall?"_

"Were you not listening to _anything_ Caroline?" Stefan cut in, his voice hostile. "We didn't do it for kicks," Stefan returned. "Quetsiyah was three seconds away from killing us out of spite for ruining her plans, would you preferred that we just laid down for it?"

"No, Stefan, of _course_ not-"Caroline sounded horrified that Stefan would even suggest something like that, "It's just," she raised her arms like she wanted to release something to fly from her hands, then lowered them just as quickly. "We were worried, about you especially. Damon went to find you and neither of you were answering your phones, and now you're both _bleeding_ like something ran you over and tried to burn you alive-" Caroline looked to Damon for support.

"Let's derail the morbidity pity train for the sake of recent events shall we?" Damon insisted, giving her none, because as much as he was beginning to understand Caroline Forbes, he didn't want to hear her talk about what happened so clinically, not when it was this recent.

Caroline drew in a breath, licking her lips, looking the same way she did when she was an angry cheerleader back in high school, only this the emotions ran much deeper."Quetsiyah wiped Stefan's memories away Damon, she tried to _kill him,_ and _you! _You could at least _act _upset about it-"

"Enough Caroline," Damon cut in, stepping around a crack that spider webbed from black hole in the road, pieces of asphalt crumbling like dust at his feet. "Just because I'm not weeping like a depressed teenager in front of _Guiding Light_ doesn't mean that I'm emotionless about this, so back off-"

"Why?" Caroline wasn't trying to be hostile, she was just upset, and scared. She'd become close friends with Stefan recently, even through his amnesia. And the thought of Damon, his own brother, being so indifferent to what had just happened, wasn't sitting well with her. "So you can pull a Damon move and lock your emotions down in cold storage?"

"He said that's back off Caroline!" Stefan stepped right up to Caroline, glaring at her, not coldly, but with a harshness born from something she couldn't understand because she wasn't there. He folded his hands over each other and pointed them at her with each word "Just, Shut. Up."

The blonde Vampire's mouth closed at the anger in Stefan's voice, swallowing the words that would never see fruition in shocked silence.

"I get it," Stefan breathed out audibly, like dry leaves being scraped across the ground. "You hate my brother, I know what that's like. I spent those first few days when I was freed from the safe hating him, because I needed him to show up when that door opened, I needed him to not forget about me, but then I forgot about him-but being angry's never going to make things even Caroline It's never going to be restitution for what you _think_ Damon did, or for Quetseyiah trying to kill Damon right in front of me because she knew that no amount of hate could ever take away how that felt."

The intensity of the looks from Caroline and Elena burned through Stefan like the morning sun breaking the barrier spell of his Daylight Ring; he turned back to the rubble of Damon's car because that feeling was blinding.

Damon watched his brother, feeling something tug in him, the same tug he felt when he found out that Stefan had been locked up and thrown into a quarry, when he had been lit up on fire on the roadside, had screamed his name in what Damon thought was last time he would see his brother. Something so deep it could swallow the entire mountain they were standing on and still leave room to drown in.

Damon stepped over to Caroline, stopping a half foot in front of her, but not retaliating with the anger than he was known for. Instead, he side stepped over to Elena.

Elena's brows creased when she saw the expression on his face. "Damon?" His name was a million questions wanting to ask themselves all at once.

Damon cupped her face in his hands, kissing her, not passionately, but long, with a warm breath, like he was drawing strength because his had gone somewhere in the night.

"Damon-?" Elena's question became softer after she felt what she did in his kiss. She grasped his hands on her neck. "Talk to me, please-"

Damon pulled away, watching her dark eyes, letting the crease of his thumb slide away from her face.

"I'm sorry-"

Stefan turned at the utterance of those words.

In 165 years Damon only apologized for a handful of things, things that were his fault alone, things that were the result of the times they lived in – But every reason, one like this.

Damon moved past Elena slowly over to Stefan. "Hey-" His hands went on each of his younger brother's shoulders, squeezing both of them in place of the hug that Stefan would've given had it been him.

It was a gesture that Damon hadn't done in such a long time that Stefan half thought he was hallucinating again. But Damon's grip was solid, even with the audience he knew Damon would not have preferred.

"Let it go Brother."

There was no curtained parlor, no bourbon, no drowning, it wasn't even the same words Stefan had hallucinated over and over again while he died a thousand times over. It had been replaced by the reality of the night, the mountainside, the reality of his brother.

Stefan nodded, unable to talk, still remembering things that would haunt his nightmares for a very, very, long time, torn between not wanting to remember anything again, but at the same time, _wanting _to because it still counted.

Damon watched Stefan's expression go somewhere else. "I know-" He exhaled everything that came after that, Stefan watching him with the understanding.

Damon released his grip on Stefan and watched as moved past him towards Elena's Mini Cooper, and after a moment, followed just a few steps behind.

Elena shared a glance with Caroline, their voices gone to silence as they watched.

**xxxxXxxx**

**END**

This ending was a long time coming, the story created itself, from itself, if that makes sense. It started as one idea, but took me down an entirely different path, winding, creepy, and longer than I anticipated (though I love that part).

And the ending was hard because I had to feel it out, not make it too sappy, or about the external parts of the brothers, but _about_ the brothers, about the reality of a connection that is older than anything else.

I placed the part from 5x07 about Damon buying Stefan his motorcycle because I thought that was pretty awesome.

Thanks for reading.

Mystic


End file.
